FACE launches Pulsar TRAC, the First Social Media Research Platform Made for Big Data

Pulsar TRAC moves the industry beyond simple social media monitoring, with its advanced social intelligence platform

LONDON; NEW YORK; HONG KONG - April 18, 2013 - Today Face, the global strategic insight agency, announced the release of Pulsar TRAC, an advanced social intelligence platform which pushes social media research beyond keyword tracking.

Born out of 10 years experience of research and planning with social data, Pulsar TRAC (TOPIC, REACH, AUDIENCE, CONTENT) is built on a robust intelligence framework enabling marketers to do more than just keyword tracking: measuring the reach of conversations, mapping brand audiences and tracking content diffusion. Whereas all traditional social media monitoring platforms look at the content of conversations, Pulsar TRAC takes monitoring a step further by indexing and analyzing the social connections, the interests and the digital behaviors of the authors, as well.

“Face's Pulsar TRAC is invaluable for identifying real-time insight into the way that our audiences are engaging with content and stories,” said Justin Wyatt, Vice President of Primary Research at NBC Universal. “Having a real-time, real-world view of how content spreads and creates connections is vital from an insight perspective. The key difference with PULSAR TRAC was that the platform offers a high quality social media insight system, supported by analysis that created meaningful stories from the data. Face also ‘connects-the-dots’ between these analyses and other qualitative and quantitative learning to offer a holistic view with clear actionable steps for our business.”

Pulsar TRAC solves many of the issues found in the more than 200 social media tools currently on the market, such as the obsession with basic volume-led metrics, the lack of demographic and behavioral context, no understanding of the audience, poor interfaces, and the inability to weight the impact of conversations.

Engineered for Big Data, the platform collects social and news content in 140 languages, can process up to 7,500 tweets-per-second, 60 million tweets-per-day, and perform complex queries on millions of conversations. Built to ensure always-on performances on huge interactive datasets, Pulsar TRAC enables methods of researching social data no other platform supports, including:

•Audience Mapping: The tracking and analysis of the content and behaviors produced by a set audience, going beyond just a full indexing and analysis of the content of the conversations, but also of the authors and their social graph.

•Content Tracking: Who, when, where and how a specific piece of content, identified by a URL, was shared in social media.

•Visibility Analysis: Provides a reach estimation of each message as a way of weighting the content. Visibility algorithms are media specific and take into account the format of the post (e.g. tweet vs. blog post), the size of the audience of the author of the post (e.g. number of Twitter followers vs. unique visitors of a blog), and the virality of the post (how many times a particular post has been shared in social media).

•Robust Sentiment Analysis: Pulsar TRAC uses two different tracks for sentiment analysis; one optimized for short-form content (below 140 characters) grammatically weak and context-poor, and one optimized for longer-form content (above 140 characters) structured and context-rich. In addition, the platform provides crowdsourced sentiment analysis and sentiment rating by plugging into platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower, a crowdsourcing service where users get micropayments for completing microtasks.

“With Pulsar TRAC we are delivering on our vision of social intelligence for brands by helping companies put consumers at the heart of their business, giving them a real time, in depth and holistic view of their customers,” said Andrew Needham, CEO of Face. “Researchers and planners have become disillusioned with current social media monitoring tools for a variety of reasons. We have taken all of this into consideration when we developed Pulsar TRAC. This launch is the first in a series of planned product releases from Face, which marks an evolution of the business from a research agency to a technology driven insight consultancy.”

Pulsar TRAC is available immediately at www.pulsarplatform.com.

About Face

Face is a strategic insight agency. We deliver socially intelligent research to help companies build lifelong customer relationships by using a mix of qualitative insight, real time social data and smart thinking.

Face is part of the Cello Group, who have annualised revenue in excess of £125m, annualised operating income in excess of £60m and employs 1000 professional staff. For more information on Face, please visit www.facegroup.com

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